Following up last year’s acclaimed drama The Brutalist, Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet returned this year with The Testament of Ann Lee, this time with the former directing and the latter co-writing. Led by Amanda Seyfried in a career-defining performance, with a cast also including Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott, and Stacy Martin, Searchlight Pictures has picked up the historical drama/musical for a December 25 release, including on 70mm. Ahead of the release, the first trailer has now arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “From award-winning writer-director Mona Fastvold (The World to Come, The Brutalist) comes the extraordinary true legend of Ann Lee, founder of the religious sect known as the Shakers. Academy Award nominee Amanda Seyfried stars as the Shaker’s irrepressible leader, who preached gender and social equality and was revered by her followers as the female incarnation of Christ. The Testament of Ann Lee captures the ecstasy and torment of her quest to build a utopia, featuring more than a dozen original Shaker hymns reimagined as rapturous movements with choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall (Vox Lux) and original songs & score by Academy Award winner Daniel Blumberg (The Brutalist).”
Rory O’Connor said in his Venice review, “In The Testament of Ann Lee, Amanda Seyfried gives the finest performance of her career. The actress shakes, rattles, and moans through a selection of 18th-century hymns that have been updated by Daniel Blumberg, the composer who shouted out London’s Cafe Oto (another church of peculiar noises) after winning an unlikely and richly deserved Oscar for The Brutalist earlier this year. Directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written by her partner Brady Corbet, Testament feels so symbiotic to their previous movie that it’s not hard to picture Seyfried’s Lee––the real-life founder of the Shaker movement and a woman who believed herself to be the second coming––and Adrien Brody’s László Tóth existing in the same grainy, textured, 70mm frame (if a century or so apart).”
See the trailer below.
The post The Testament of Ann Lee Trailer: Amanda Seyfried Wants to Build a Utopia first appeared on The Film Stage.
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